Jason Rantanen
Jason Rantanen is the David L. Hammer and Willard L. "Sandy" Boyd Professor at the University of Iowa College of Law, director of the Iowa Innovation, Business & Law Center, and associate dean for faculty.
He writes in the areas of patent law, federal courts, civil procedure, and empirical legal studies. Professor Rantanen has authored numerous articles and book chapters that address the law from practical, empirical, and theoretical perspectives, and his scholarship has appeared in the USC Law Review, Florida Law Review, Washington & Lee Law Review, American University Law Review, Michigan State Law Review, and Stanford Technology Law Journal, among others.
In addition to his teaching and scholarship, Professor Rantanen is the faculty advisor for the Iowa Intellectual Property Law Society student group and the College of Law’s combined degree students, directs the Innovation, Business & Law Center, and serves as associate dean for faculty. Professor Rantanen is a member of the American Law Institute and the Iowa Rules of Civil Procedure Review Task Force.
Professor Rantanen’s recent publications include “Expertise, Ideology, and Dissent,” with Paul Gugliuzza and Jonathan Remy Nash in the American University Law Review; “Predictable Unpredictability: The Surprising Administrability of Patent Subject Matter Eligibility,” with Nikola Datzov in the Iowa Law Review; and “Legal Research as a Collective Enterprise: An Examination of Data Availability in Empirical Legal Scholarship,” with Abigail A. Matthews in the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization. He is also the creator of the Compendium of Federal Circuit Decisions, the largest and most comprehensive publicly-available dataset on decisions by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit; Introduction to Intellectual Property: Cases and Questions, an open-access textbook; and Rules & Laws for Civil Actions, an open-access set of rules and statutes for Civil Procedure, Federal Courts, Evidence, and Constitutional Law courses, with Stella Burch Elias, Derek Muller, Caroline Sheerin, and Maya Steinitz.
Professor Rantanen will teach Civil Procedure and Introduction to Intellectual Property in spring 2026.
Practice and Teaching:
- Patent Law
- Introduction to Intellectual Property
- Trademarks and Unfair Competition
- Administrative Law
- Civil Procedure
Affiliations:
